


Fifty Years Later

by Nicnac



Series: Five Years Older and Extras [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Family, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-17 04:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13651218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicnac/pseuds/Nicnac
Summary: Meta, deleted scenes, and other such for Five Years Older.





	1. Meta: The Thirty-Five Years

**Author's Note:**

> I had a number of people asking about the Five Years Older AU and the changes to the timeline as a result of Mabel's interference. I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I wanted to share, as well as share some deleted scenes that didn't quite make the final cut. This first chapter is meta on what happens from when Mabel leaves the past up until the time the twins arrive. More to come.

Mabel leaves to go back to her own time on August 10th, 1975.

On June 4th, 1976 the Mystery Shack has its grand opening. There are three key differences between this Mystery Shack and the canon one, aside from the earlier opening.

One: Stan was able to use the money from his and Mabel’s crazy road trip and the unicorn treasure as start-up capital, so he has a good collection of exhibits right from the get-go.

Two: though the place is still very much inspired by Stan’s natural theatrical flair and has the feel of a tourist trap, all the exhibits are 100% factual. Mostly. This is due to a couple of factors. With Ford not getting swallowed up by a mysterious portal, Stan no longer blames the supernatural for his brother’s disappearance and is therefore far last hostile toward it. Ford’s presence also means Stan has to deal with Ford getting prickly whenever he thinks the Mystery Shack is verging into mocking the supernatural. Ford doesn’t try to tell Stan how to run his business, but as real or fake doesn’t make a huge difference to Stan, it’s easier to do the real stuff and not upset his brother. Luckily, Stan has a couple advantages over Dipper preventing a repeat of the gremloblin fiasco. Stan doesn’t actually care if people believe the exhibits are real or not, so long as they’re willing to pay to see them, and he doesn’t keep live specimens of highly dangerous creatures. In fact he doesn’t keep live specimens at all anymore, not after the fairies got too annoying and the gnomes kept breaking out of their cages. He sticks to replicas and pictures.

Three: the Mystery Shack isn’t located in Ford’s house, at least not to start. Stan rents out a commercial building in town.

For a while, things go pretty well. Stan and Ford live together in Ford’s house. Ford has his research, which he happily shares with Stan, who uses it for inspiration for the Mystery Shack. Occasionally Ford will ask for Stan’s help with some project or other, or Stan will drag Ford into town to interact with other human beings for a change.

By 1980, Ford is getting frustrated with his lack of progress toward the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness. Stan tries pointing out that a person’s life’s work should theoretically take their whole life, and Ford’s only in his 20’s, but it doesn’t help. Ford gets increasingly frustrated, and finally decides to recite an incantation he found in an old cave. Enter Bill.

Bill’s smart enough to realize that Stan isn’t going to buy into the whole “benevolent muse” shtick, so he tells Ford that part of the whole muse deal is that no one else but Ford can know about him. Ford’s a little suspicious of this, but he decides to go with it at first on the grounds that he can always tell someone else later, but he can’t untell them if he tells them now. Eventually Bill earns his trust, and Ford keeps his silence about Bill out of respect for his wishes. Stan can sense his brother is keeping something from him, but Ford brushes it off as nothing, so Stan tries to brush it off too.

Circa July 1981, Bill gives Ford the idea for the portal, Ford calls Fiddleford up, and Fiddleford arrives in Gravity Falls. Stan and Fiddleford become friends, and we get a little Mystery Trio for a while.

As work on the portal continues, Fiddleford gets more and more spooked about the whole thing, which triggers Stan’s earlier concerns about Ford keeping something from him. Ford continues to deny all allegations and insists on keeping up work on the portal. Tensions rise.

January 18th, 1982 Ford and Fiddleford perform the first test of the portal. Fiddleford falls in briefly, then panics and quits the project. Stan is home at the time – the Mystery Shack is closed Monday-Thursday in the off-season – and Fiddleford runs into him on his way out. He gives Stan some vague, very disturbing warnings and leaves. Stan goes down to the basement to confront his brother, but Ford continues to refuse to say anything about Bill and insists that everything is fine and Ford can handle everything by himself if he has to. Stan leaves.

Ford confronts Bill, and Bill reveals the truth about the portal and that he’d been tricking Ford all along. He torments Ford, and Ford sinks deep into desperation and paranoia, all the while futilely trying to convince himself that Stan will be back any day now. Meanwhile, Stan has been living in the Mystery Shack, futilely trying to convince himself that Ford will be coming after him any day now. They are both idiots.

Some time passes and eventually Ford comes into town to get coffee and runs into Stan at the diner. He begs Stan to come home, and Stan agrees. Unfortunately for Ford, right before he arrived Stan had been talking to a sympathetic stranger who had really riled Stan’s ire up about Ford not trusting him, so while Stan has agreed to go home with Ford, he’s still on edge. The stranger was, of course, an undercover time cop.

When Ford leads Stan down to the basement, Stan is hopeful that Ford’s finally going to tell Stan what’s been going on. Instead Ford leaves it at the portal is actually very dangerous – something Stan had already figured out – and asks Stan to take Journal 1 somewhere very far away. Stan snaps. He screams at Ford for trying to make him leave when clearly Ford is in trouble, and why can’t Ford just trust him. Ford snaps back that he doesn’t understand why Stan would be so upset at Ford asking him to leave, since he had already abandoned Ford. A fight ensues, a scuffle breaks out, Stan gets burned, and Ford falls through the portal.

Stan spends three days trying to fix the portal. Finally he gets the idea to go into town to get Fiddleford’s help. He manages to find Fiddleford and explains the situation, but Fiddleford refuses to help. He’s certain that if it’s been three days since Ford fell through, then Ford is already dead and opening the portal now would only spell disaster. They fight about it. Fiddleford continues to refuse to help, though he concedes that he won’t actively try to stop Stan, and doesn’t entirely blame Stan for wanting to try.

Stan goes to the police and reports Ford missing. He says that he woke up two days ago and Ford was gone, leaving no indication of where he went. Stan claims that at first he assumed Ford had go on some kind of research expedition in the woods, but all the camping gear is still at the house, so if that were the case then Ford should have returned by now. There are search parties, but obviously nothing turns up.

Stan continues to live in Ford’s house, which nobody questions because he’s been living there for years. In fact, most people aren’t even aware that Ford is the sole owner of the property. Stan also gives up his lease and relocates the Mystery Shack to Ford’s house. Some people do raise some eyebrows over that, but the general assumption is that without his brother helping to pay the bills, Stan can’t afford to upkeep the house and rent the commercial space. This is partially true, but only because Stan is funneling so much money into fixing the portal. The other reason he moves the Mystery Shack is because he doesn’t like being away all day every work day – he wants to be close so he can keep an eye on the portal.

Stan and Fiddleford remain friends, despite getting into a fight about the portal pretty much every time they see each other. Because of this, Stan notices when Fiddleford’s condition begins to deteriorate. Finally, after Fiddleford breaks his arm hitting yet another car in town, Stan confronts him and Fiddleford confesses to the whole memory gun thing. Stan helps him kick the habit and Fiddleford is left in a position where he’s not totally all there, but he can still mostly take care of himself.

The Society of the Blind Eye is not pleased by Fiddleford’s sudden disavowal of memory erasure, and they erase themselves from his memory. Stan notices that Fiddleford has gotten worse again. At first he thinks that Fiddleford must have had a back-up gun after they broke his original and has started to erase this own memory again, but he follows the trail back and eventually discovers the Society. He breaks their gun too and threatens them if they ever go near Fiddleford again.

Fiddleford does okay after that, especially as Stan looks in on him on a regular basis, though Fiddleford refuses to go anywhere near the shack. Eventually when Tate grows up he moves to Gravity Falls and Fiddleford moves in with him. Between Stan’s support and bullying, Tate never abandons his dad, and helps take care of him.

Five years after Ford “goes missing” Filbrick tries to get him legally declared dead so that he can sell all Ford’s stuff and at least get a little money off of his “disappointment of a son” that way. However, it is illegal to declare someone dead in Gravity Falls without a body or credible witness to their death, and it has been ever since a time cop planted a bug in Quentin Trembley’s ear right before Trembley squirreled himself away and encased his body in peanut brittle in an attempt to make himself immortal. As such, all of Ford’s stuff remains in his name, and Stan continues to look after it for him.

After that things are mostly according to canon until the twins show up. More on that later, possibly.


	2. Stan and Ford Chapter 13 Outtake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a little bit that goes right after the end of chapter 13.

Stan cleared his throat. “So about what we were talking about earlier, what I was planning on doing now. Mabel might have let something slip back before she promised not to tell us anymore about the future.”

“I was under the impression she let a lot of things slip,” Ford said.

“True, but you’d be surprised at how much of it I almost immediately forgot.” Not that Stan didn’t care or hadn’t been listening or anything like that. It was just that most of Mabel’s stories had sounded pretty crazy at the time and basically none of them had any sort of context which made a lot of the details hard to remember. “This one stuck though. Now hear me put on this: it’s called The Mystery Shack.”

Ford groaned. “This already sounds like a terrible idea.”

Oh. Stan let his arm slip down from around Ford’s shoulders. He had known that his brother wasn’t going to be real gung-ho about the idea and would probably need some convincing, but Stan hadn’t been expecting Ford to shut him down flat. A sharp comeback was sitting on the edge of his tongue, but Stan bit it back. Ford didn’t want to listen to Stan’s idea? Fine, then Stan would go get Gompers’ stupid sweater and make him listen.

Stan’s thoughts were interrupted by a nudge to his shoulder. “Well go on,” Ford said, smiling at him. “I’m listening.”


	3. Extended Ending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally Chapter 14 was going to go a bit longer, but I ended up deciding it ended best right at Dipper and Mabel's hug. This is the bit that happened after that, picking up after Dipper and Mabel have stopped hugging and sat down on Mabel's couch.

"So not that I'm not glad you're here" - she was, she was so, so glad - "but why are you here? I thought you were coming over later."

Dipper looked at her incredulously. "I was, but then you screamed, said Time Baby was going to vaporize you, and hung up the phone."

She gave him a smack on the arm. "I was being dramatic, silly. Time Baby would never actually vaporize me. Just like how sometimes I say that you're going to kill me, but you'd never actually do it no matter how much cake batter I accidentally spilled on your laptop."

"I  _knew_  it!" Dipper said. Oh right, Mabel had told him Waddles had done that. Well, cat was out of the bag now.

"And you didn't kill me for it. Seriously, I was talking to Time Baby just now and I'm pretty sure we're secretly his best friends."

"That... makes an alarming amount of sense. Which is deeply distrubing on many levels."

"Che, now you're being dramatic. Time Baby just loves us because we're awesome. It's a common affliction."

"Well you got one thing right," Dipper said. He reached his arm around her shoulders and ruffled her hair. "Loving you is definitely an affliction."

Mabel half-turned so she could use both her hands to mess up Dipper’s hair. “Yep, it’s a disease and you’ve got it. Look at you, running over here to save me.”

“I thought Time Baby was going to kill you!”

“Sure you did. You’ve got a bad, bad case of the Mabel-itis,” she said.

“Inflammation of the Mabel?” Dipper asked.

“Inflammation of your _heart_ because of how much you love me,” Mabel countered. “And I’m afraid it’s terminal.”

“Oh no,” Dipper said, flopping back on the couch dramatically. “Tell me doc, how much longer do I have to live?”

“Maybe only a minute, maybe a million, billion years, it’s hard to tell,” Mabel said. “All we can do now it make sure you’re comfortable in your final hours.”

“I understand.” Dipper flopped over again, this time down the side of the couch until he landed his big self right on top of Mabel, crushing her. “Okay, feeling pretty comfortable.”

“Ugh, get off me.” Mabel squirmed and wriggled until she finally managed to push Dipper right off the couch. He landed on the floor with a thud, and Mabel laughed at him. “Ha! Take that.”

“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” Dipper said. He jumped up off the ground, then stuck both his hands in Mabel’s hair, messing it up way worse than she had Dipper’s hair, because Mabel had way more hair to mess up. It was totally an unfair advantage. Then while Mabel was distracted trying to get all the hair out of her face, Dipper sat back down on the couch and plopped his feet in her lap.

Mabel eyed them, then instead of pushing them off she decided to retaliate by pulling off his socks and painting his toenails with one of the bottles of nail polish she had sitting on the end table.

 Dipper tensed for a second, then sighed. “What color is it?”

“Deepest Ocean,” Mabel answered as she started work on his big toe.

“Okay, I resign myself to this. But you have to tell me all about what you did to get Time Baby angry at you.”

“Deal,” Mabel said. “It’s a long story, but the short version is I went back in time, got Cinderella to the ball, fixed everything, and everyone lived happily ever after. Mostly. Eventually.”

“Yeah… Unless you’re saying that Cinderella was actually a real person and you literally helped her get to the ball, I think I’m going to need the long version,” Dipper said.

“ _Fine_ ,” Mabel whined, but she was grinning while she did it. “It all started when I went for a walk in the park…”


End file.
